A Prophet: Grade B

B

A Prophet (2009)

Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Hichem Yacoubi; Co-writer and Director Jacques Audiard. (French and Arabic; subtitled).

A young North African Arab (Rahim) is sent to prison in Marseilles, for what I can’t remember, and begins his prison career as a naïve innocent, subject to the brutality and racial gangs that are endemic. The Islamic gang is ineffective and unable to protect him but an older Corsican gangster (Arestrup) admires his strength and independence and offers Corsican protection if he will kill a troublesome foe in the prison. The youth agrees and becomes a sort of mascot to the Corsican gang.

As a model prisoner he is eventually let out for a day a week on a work-release parole, during which time he accomplishes various gangster tasks for the Corsican mobster, including drug trafficking and murder, but always, it seems, working first and foremost for himself. After nearly 2.5 hours (!), he has become the “Godfather” of all the gangs in Marseilles by the time his prison term is up.

The plot is a little too complicated at times to keep the players and their mutual grievances straight, but that’s not too important because they are just gangsters acting gangstery anyway. This is not Coppola’s Godfather as blurbed on the video box, where characters were well developed. These are not. But the acting is terrific by these non-professional actors and the viewer gets a palpable sense of gritty, violent, amoral prison society, an exotic and alien society that exists invisibly within our mainstream one. For all that, it is a worthwhile film.

The Killing Gene: Grade B

B

The Killing Gene (2007)

Stellan Skarsgård, Barbara Adair; Director Tom Shankland.

This British crime drama is violent, bloody, and brutal. There is torture, mutilation, rape, and lots of blood. I generally dislike gory violence and especially, torture, because it is almost invariably gratuitous – blood for the sake of blood. Pure sensationalism. But not in this film.

The idea is that a rape and mutilation victim who recovered and survived into adulthood wants revenge on the police detective and several others who failed to capture her tormentor. But the interesting thing about revenge is that it does not work. Let’s say you track down and kill the person who did you wrong. The perpetrator gets little or no satisfaction from that, and the victim of revenge typically feels anger but not remorse. Nobody is satisfied, nobody learns anything, and the project is a failure.

What if you just beat up and mutilate your tormenter? Same thing: It does not make you whole, and it is not a situation in which the tormenter has an inclination to remorse. Again it fails. I had thought that the perfect revenge movie could not be made therefore, but this one comes close.

The vengeant woman’s strategy is to capture her victim and, somebody that person loves. Then she tortures that person until they agree to kill the person they love to end the pain. That’s her revenge, to watch her tormenter suffer both physical and emotional pain the way she did. That might work, psychologically.

In this movie, she kills the victim after the victim kills the loved one, whereas it seems it might be better to let that person live with the psychological pain of what they did. That would be better revenge. And she not only kills them but mutilates them by carving messages into their flesh (before or after the torture is not clear). What sense does that make in the context of the revenge theory? Not much, so that mutilation aspect borders on the gratuitous.

Nevertheless, there is an overlaid story that she is or was a mad scientist of some sort who had studied the genetics of altruism and was interested in finding out if the genetic predisposition to care for your loved ones can be overcome by torture. That is a pretty weak experimental question, and in the final scenes, the victim and the loved one are not even genetically related. So overall the story does not make a lot of sense, but it is well acted, well photographed, thought-provoking, and I liked its new theory of revenge, so I give it a paradoxical B even though I dislike blood and guts movies as a rule.

Zombieland: Grade C

C

Zombieland (2009)

Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, with Bill Murray; Director Reuben Fleischer.

A young man (Eisenberg) is a lone survivor in a future America where a virus has turned everyone into flesh-eating zombies. He begins a journey to see if his parents are alive. Along the way he hitches a ride from a tough-guy zombie killer (Harrelson) and they develop an uneasy friendship as they drive across country, killing zombies and searching for a Hostess Twinkie, the tough’s favorite food. They encounter two young women (Stone and Breslin) who eventually join them and so it is a road trip where paranoia gradually fades, and trust, even real affection slowly develops among the survivors. Inevitably, the women get trapped by a huge pack of zombies and have to be rescued by the men in a glorious slaughter.

The movie is really a romantic comedy that just happens to have zombies in it. As a comedy, it is similar to Shaun of the Dead, and the romantic and friendship relationships make the characters more than just cartoons. Woody Harrelson plays his Crocodile Dundee character to a T. Eisenberg has some funny, ironic lines as the “sensitive” zombie killer. Breslin is there to be cute, and does that. Stone, I thought, was directed poorly. Her character has a gothic look, not too bright or expressive, which doesn’t add much. Maybe she is just not as strong an actor as the others.

There are plenty of funny lines and visual gags. The action is kinetic, the characters interesting. Plus you have some good special effects with the zombie gore as they eat their victims. But bottom line, it is a dumb story and the comedy angle has already been done better, and how many zombie films can there be, anyway? As a me-too movie, it is amusing but not inspired. It will appeal to boys under 18.